{"title":"Divided","authors":"Pamela Royston Macfie","doi":"10.1353/sew.2023.a909276","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sew.2023.a909276","url":null,"abstract":"Divided Pamela Royston Macfie (bio) 1 I remember nothing of the actual moment in which the horse and I fell to earth. Everything of the taste of blood, the crack of breaking bones, the groaning of a horse in pain, the smell of dust and lather. I couldn't move; neither could the thoroughbred. Later, I was told that he had struck the top of the fence with his upper forelegs and somersaulted forward. I had fallen to the right, by instinct perhaps, or training, or some strange pull of gravity. I do know that I had approached the jump, the last in what had been a clear round, with confidence. I had followed Beech as he took off; we were one. Then the sky sheered, and we went down. When I came to, the field felt like concrete. Hard ground increases the risk of a horse taking a \"bad step,\" but I had not walked the course. Beside me, a twelve-hundred-pound red-gold horse I barely knew scissored his legs, and I worried I could still be crushed. Someone shouted, \"Don't move. We're coming.\" The world had constricted: crowded together, there was me, flat on my belly, my right [End Page 626] arm forked unnaturally, and Beech, his back hooves near my head. When the captain of the riding team knelt beside me, I said, \"Someone needs to get this horse up. Call an ambulance. A vet.\" I heard the coach say, \"Your visor snapped off.\" She told someone to ride to the barn and make the calls. There were no cell phones in 1987. There was the wait, then the wail of an ambulance's distant siren, then nothing but the snort and shudder of the horse beside me. The driver, I was told later, had been asked to cut the siren before he reached the barn in order not to spook the horses. When the vehicle scraped to a stop a few yards in front of me, I smelled its engine's metallic heat and recognized the EMT in charge. He was a fifth-year senior who had failed my Early Modern poetry seminar focused on the art of dying the previous spring. John crouched down, studied the splintered club that had been my right arm, and said gently, \"Professor Macfie, you have a compound fracture. We'll take care of you.\" The coach added, \"She might also have a spinal injury; you'll want to immobilize her.\" I wanted to cry. It was my six-month wedding anniversary. 2 A rotational fall can be fatal for both rider and horse. If a rider does not fall clear when her horse somersaults forward, she may be crushed. If the center section of a horse's back bends too far, the horse may be paralyzed. As the ambulance bumped over the gravel road that led back to campus, I studied the traction chains that permitted my injured arm to be suspended above me. My arm swayed with the vehicle's motion, and I worried I would be sick. [End Page 627] My father had a recording of his own rotational fall in a point-to-point race from when he was seventeen years old. He and his thoroughbred, Pinecone, went down at the seventh fence, and he, like me, was carted off in an ambulance. The ambulance did not appear in the black-and-wh","PeriodicalId":134476,"journal":{"name":"The Sewanee Review","volume":"93 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135688569","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Guillotine","authors":"Michelle Hart","doi":"10.1353/sew.2023.a909280","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sew.2023.a909280","url":null,"abstract":"Guillotine Michelle Hart (bio) When Elle was twelve, her father purchased a private guided tour of the Musée d'Orsay for the two of them. He had just gotten divorced from Elle's mother, who had announced she would use the settlement to travel around Europe. Elle's father, however, wanted to win and whisked Elle away to France first. Elle was accustomed by then to seeing herself as an asset her parents could barter, and she was glad to at least be considered their prized possession. Elle had always gravitated toward her father, and still continued to do so, although the divorce was his fault; he was the one who had cheated. Women flirted with him often. He was handsome and mysterious. His family was Dutch, still living somewhere in the Netherlands, presumably, but in over a decade of marriage and parenthood he had never introduced them to his wife or daughter. All Elle and her mother really knew about his past was that he used to be poor. He was a black hole of a man. Growing up, Elle watched with envy how willingly the men and women he met got sucked in. [End Page 695] They were in Paris for three days. Her father was there on business, and while he had meetings in the Défense district, Elle looked at the Eiffel Tower from their hotel balcony. She had a framed photograph of it, taken by her mother, in her bedroom back home, and it was both surreal and pleasing to have it now within reach. She felt then that she was correct in choosing her father. It was on the evening of their last full day in Paris that they toured the Orsay. Their guide was a woman named Julie, who looked like a younger version of Elle's mother, with the same toothy smile and tawny hair. She looked so much like Elle's mother that at first Elle worried her father would be put off and spend the evening in a fit. But upon greeting the guide, he smiled and calmly produced from the pocket of his suit jacket a printed-out voucher. \"Hello,\" he said, and gave the paper to the guide. He was most at ease when he received what he believed he was owed. He offered his name to Julie. As he did this, Julie took his hand in both of hers. It was a gesture that Elle found more affectionate than necessary. Still, an electric thrill coursed through her. Standing next to her father while a woman fawned over him was like watching a professional athlete live, or like viewing a lauded work of art in person. People said Elle and her father looked alike; she couldn't wait to get older and collect the same attention. \"I'm Elle,\" she said. \"My daughter,\" he said. \"How lovely,\" said Julie. \"She must be special.\" \"She's everything. She's all I have.\" Elle couldn't recall hearing her father speak that way about her before. He was a cool man; the only time he radiated heat was in flashes of fury. This indifference was, Elle came to understand, a large part of his appeal; she'd grown up watching her mother try to spark scintillas of his interest. Elle's apparent importance in his life [End Page 696] elated her","PeriodicalId":134476,"journal":{"name":"The Sewanee Review","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135688597","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"In Praise of Panic","authors":"Stephanie Danler","doi":"10.1353/sew.2023.a909284","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sew.2023.a909284","url":null,"abstract":"In Praise of Panic Stephanie Danler (bio) During graduate school, one of my professors periodically fell asleep at his desk. He also took calls mid-lecture and excused himself to the hallway to have conversations with his fiancée about their upcoming travel. He was annoyed when a student wanted to talk about racism in Absalom, Absalom!, and after making us read Swann's Way, the first volume of Proust's In Search of Lost Time, we spent a total of twenty minutes talking about it. Still, in spite of his erratic tendencies, the reading list was worth the price of admission. His class on \"Shadow Narration\"—a study of parallelism, repetition, and story development outside of traditional plot—introduced me to Kojo Laing, César Aira, Thomas Bernhard. It ended up being the most important course I took in my MFA for two reasons. First, he had us read William Gass's \"In the Heart of the Heart of the Country\" and then, in the style of that magnificent story, had us do a writing exercise, which became the beginning of my first novel. The second reason is he gave a salient piece of craft advice amid a sea of well-intentioned cheerleading: \"You want advice on how to become a writer? Marry someone rich.\" [End Page 743] ________ Back in the spring of 2022, my anxiety got to the point that I couldn't even grocery shop. We were supposed to be out of a pandemic, and nothing in my life was where I left it. I had an eighteen-month-old and a three-year-old. I was working on four scripts at the same time, three pilots and one feature. It made progress on my third book erratic and demoralizing. Every time the glass doors of Whole Foods slid open, I stared into an abyss of air-conditioned, scentless despair. Somewhere between the waste and environmental devastation—the homogeneity of the produce, the plastic balloons of snacks, the prices—my heart rate soared. I sometimes bit back tears while comparing brands of milk. On occasion I abandoned a full cart and drove myself home, crying without reason. Once, while a cashier waited for me to pay, I apologized and ran out of the store. From that day forward, my husband took over the grocery shopping. I decided it was time I tried an SSRI. I had steadfastly refused them since they were first mentioned to me by a psychiatrist at sixteen. What provoked a change of heart? There are people depending on me. My children were having the kind of rich, raucous childhood I craved when I was small. Yet I found myself unable to join them in the sunlight. Or as Wisława Szymborska puts it in her gorgeous poem \"Life While-You-Wait,\" I felt \"ill-prepared for the privilege of living.\" I had tried different therapies; I quit drinking and social media; I put my phone in the other room while I slept. I exercised, I walked around the Silver Lake Reservoir humming mantras about self-compassion. Nothing worked. It seemed time to try these pills that had helped so many of my friends because I was spent otherwise. Sleeping on Prozac was the sleep of the","PeriodicalId":134476,"journal":{"name":"The Sewanee Review","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135688586","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Bird of Paradise","authors":"Shannon Sanders","doi":"10.1353/sew.2023.a909278","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sew.2023.a909278","url":null,"abstract":"Bird of Paradise Shannon Sanders (bio) Evening fell and up came the automated glow of the citronella torches. Cassandra had noticed them as she first stepped into her boss's backyard, a dozen earthen obelisks discreetly lining the patio and the outer reaches of the lawn, and registered them as a particularly un-Jon-like aspect of his Takoma Park home. Difficult to imagine the university president—who dressed each day as if for a press conference, fleurs-delis flashing at his jacket cuffs and the school colors shining in the satiny threads of one bow tie from his bottomless reserve—strutting into a Lowe's in search of these garden lights that looked like mud sculptures. Now, though, the darkness-activated torches turned majestic, their steely basins emanating scent and showy little flames. This was Jon: drama, spectacle, pomp and circumstance, and so forth. Presidential! However, while the torches gave off a warmly flattering aura, performing small mercies on the zits and crow's-feet of the faces in the assembled crowd, they didn't provide nearly enough light if one [End Page 674] happened to be looking for someone, which Cassandra was. \"Sorry, just a minute,\" she told the group clustered around her. She touched the arm of the person before her—some young hanger-on from Student Affairs—and the seas parted; she pushed through. She needed her nieces for a photo, quickly. They'd only just been here, gathered with the crowd on the patio to hear Jon's end-ofevening remarks, and then seemed to disperse as Cassandra was swept up in toasts and congratulations. She thought now that she saw one by the koi pond, a high-piled puff of hair above a shadowed young face, a lissome body in black. She headed that way, gathering the skirt of her dress in one hand and clutching her glass of Opus One in the other, careful, so careful not to trip. \"Beautiful dress,\" murmured a woman named Janet as their shoulders grazed each other in passing. Janet would start the upcoming semester as the new dean of diversity and inclusion, once Cassandra ascended to the role of provost. Passing Cassandra the name of her favorite fashion rental service had been Janet's first act of solidarity with her predecessor. \"A little birdie helped me find it,\" said Cassandra, winking, and hustled past. For Jon, for this, Cassandra had chosen a dress called the Zofia by a designer well outside her ken, a magenta cocktail number with a plume of shirring for a shoulder strap. She had done so understanding that it would draw even more than the usual share of Michelle Obama comparisons so many of her colleagues seemed dead set on making, suggestive as it was of last year's inaugural ball gown. That was all right; one could see that as a sort of compliment. The Zofia had been a nod to Jon's preference for sartorial regality. Cassandra had had her hairstylist put in a bronze rinse and take off an extra inch to dilute the Michelle-ness of the overall look, and—it was all fine. But the structure of the ","PeriodicalId":134476,"journal":{"name":"The Sewanee Review","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135688588","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Keeper and the Tether","authors":"Genevieve Plunkett","doi":"10.1353/sew.2023.a909274","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sew.2023.a909274","url":null,"abstract":"The Keeper and the Tether Genevieve Plunkett (bio) Mom says we moved here because the schools are better, but we know that it's really because Dad fell in love with Allie and Mom can't stand that. She tells me and Sis our new school's director was raised a Quaker, like that will make us understand what all the hype is about, but we are immediately like: Quaker parrot. Quaker OATS. When Sis and I were young, I made her a stick-figure doll from a wooden tongue depressor, chopped out the Quaker Oats guy's head from a cereal box, and glued it on. Made kissy sounds: \"Here, Sis. I made you a boyfriend.\" \"I'm serious,\" says Mom. She tosses a rolled-up hallway runner onto the floor like she's hurling a dead body into a ditch. Ever since the affair—which Mom made into an affair even though Dad's dick had no part in it—she has been ruthless. She threatened to dump our Adventure Time T-shirts into a donation bin because the new school does not allow pop culture in the classroom. The new school is a \"Screen Free Zone,\" which means no iPhones, no tablets, [End Page 599] absolutely no references to what we binged on Netflix last night. They have an organic vegetable garden out back (the word \"organic\" underlined in the brochure and followed by an exclamation mark, which bothers us, it really bothers us). We ask if the kids at our new school are going to be wearing helmets, and Mom pinches her thumb and forefinger in front of our faces to tell us that we are this close. \"Closer than Dad's dick ever got to Allie,\" says Sis when we are alone. The only good thing about our new room is that the ceiling is peaked and witchy, and the floorboards are uneven, the cracks packed with dust. There is a splintery ladder that leads to a trapdoor with a padlock on it. \"Don't even try,\" Mom said, scowling at the ladder. \"It only leads to the roof. That's how you get struck by lightning.\" The room makes us feel as though ours is a bleak and tragic existence, as if we have been sent away to an orphanage, or at least banished to the attic. We can't wait until Dad gets here and sees the murder closet in the basement. The drained fishpond in the shady, ghost-cold corner of the yard. Dad stayed in Boston to finish up a case, and if Mom thinks that he is not going to use that time to go all the way with Allie (because it will be the last chance that he will ever get), then she is crazier than we thought. In a way, we are rooting for Dad, because what he did for Allie was a beautiful thing. ________ Sis and I explore the yard, shaking the low branches so they rain cold water on us, crawling between the hydrangeas, which are the color of a drowned person's lips. There is a stone property marker out back that we pretend is a grave. When the wind picks up, it feels like a slap of unfairness. Our family's move north feels bigger than it should, in that every small detail about the new town is glaring: the [End Page 600] different-colored license plates, the woman who pushes a four-kid str","PeriodicalId":134476,"journal":{"name":"The Sewanee Review","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135688606","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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